I cannot describe these men and women.  If you have lived with them, you will need no description, and would resent the inadequacy of mine.  If you have never had the good fortune to live with them, it is impossible to make you see them as they are.  When you once have thoroughly known them, language will fail you to do them justice, and you will prefer to be silent rather than slander them by inadequate portrayal.  They are at first sight not attractive-looking.  If you stand outside and look at them from a distance their lives will appear to you very humdrum and prosaic.  But remember that for almost thirty years our Lord lived just such a life in Nazareth, making ploughs and yokes; and then, when the younger brothers and sisters were able to care for themselves, snatched three years from supporting a peasant family in Galilee to redeem a world.  And who was Peter but a rough, hardy fisherman?

Now a Paul, trained at the feet of Gamaliel, was also needed; and the twelve did not come from the lowest ranks of society.  But they were honest, industrious, practical, courageous, hardy, common people.  And single-handed they went out to conquer empires.  And they succeeded through the power of God in them.

Who knows the possibilities of your little church in the hilltown of Smyrna?  These men and women are the pickets of God’s great host.  They are scattered up and down our land, fighting alone the great battle, unknown of men and sometimes thinking that they must be forgotten of God.  And the picket’s lonely post is what tries a man’s courage and strength.

Take your example from Paul’s epistle.  Greet Phebe, the schoolmistress, and Aquila and Priscilla on their rocky farm on the mountain-side, and greet the burden-bearing Onesiphorus.  And give them God’s greeting and encouragement, for he sends it to them through you.  Show them the heroism which there is in their “humdrum” lives; and cheer them in the efforts, of whose grandeur they are all unconscious.  Bid them “be strong and of a very good courage.”  For in the character of these people there is the granite of the eternal hills, and in their hearts should be the sunshine of God.  Do not be ashamed of your congregation.  Their dimes or dollars may look pitifully small and few on the collector’s plate; only God sees the real immensity of the gift in the self-denial which it has cost.  Your people will take sides with the cause of right, while it is still unpopular.  They have furnished the moral backbone and unswerving integrity of many of your great business houses in this city to-day.  From those families will go forth the men whom the good will trust and the evil fear.  The power for good proceeding from your church will be like the floods which Ezekiel saw pouring out from beneath the threshold of the Lord’s house.